Chapter 3
Social Cognition:
How We Think About
the Social World
Chapter Outline
Amadou Diallo (September 2, 1975 –
February 4, 1999) was a 23-year-old Guinean
immigrant in New York City who was shot and
killed on February 4, 1999 by four New York
City Police Department plain-clothed officers:
Sean Carroll, Richard Murphy, Edward
McMellon and Kenneth Boss. The four officers
fired a total of 41 rounds. The shooting took
place at 1157 Wheeler Avenue in the
Soundview section of The Bronx. The four
were part of the now-defunct Street Crimes
Unit. All four officers were acquitted at trial in
Albany, New York.
The Amadou Diallo Case
Chapter Outline
I. On Automatic Pilot: LowEffort Thinking
On Automatic Pilot: Low-Effort
Thinking
Social cognition is the study of how
people select, interpret, and use
information to make judgments
about themselves and the social
world.
On Automatic Pilot: Low-Effort
Thinking
People use mental shortcuts to
simplify the amount of information
they receive from the environment.
On Automatic Pilot: Low-Effort
Thinking
Automatic thinking is thinking that
is nonconscious, unintentional,
involuntary and effortless.
On Automatic Pilot: Low-Effort
Thinking
People as Everyday Theorists:
Automatic Thinking with Schemas
Schemas are mental structures people use
to organize their knowledge about the social
world around themes or subjects: schemas
affect what information we notice, think
about, and remember.
On Automatic Pilot: Low-Effort
Thinking
People as Everyday Theorists:
Automatic Thinking with Schemas
Schemas act as filters, screening out
information that is inconsistent with them.
Although we may notice and remember
glaring exceptions, usually we attend only
to schema-consistent information.
What if there were no
schemas?

Korsakov’s
Syndrome



No memory
No schemas
Memento
On Automatic Pilot: Low-Effort
Thinking
People as Everyday Theorists:
Automatic Thinking with Schemas
Accessibility: the ease with which schemas
can be brought to mind.
Priming: the process by which recent
experiences make schemas, traits, or
concepts come to mind more readily.
On Automatic Pilot: Low-Effort
Thinking
On Automatic Pilot: Low-Effort
Thinking
On Automatic Pilot: Low-Effort
Thinking
People as Everyday Theorists:
Automatic Thinking with Schemas
Perseverance effect: the tendency for
people’s beliefs about themselves and their
world to persist even when those beliefs
are discredited.
Example: Milosevic Case
On Automatic Pilot: Low-Effort
Thinking
People as Everyday Theorists:
Schemas and Their Influence
Self-fulfilling prophecy: whereby people
have an expectation about what another
person is like, which influences how they
act toward that person, which causes that
person to behave in a way consistent with
the original expectation.
Example: White Men Can’t Jump
White Men Can’t Jump
On Automatic Pilot: Low-Effort
Thinking
On Automatic Pilot: Low-Effort
Thinking
On Automatic Pilot: Low-Effort
Thinking
Mental Strategies and Shortcuts
Judgmental heuristics are mental shortcuts
people use to make judgments quickly and
efficiently.
: Look at the mother, take the daughter
On Automatic Pilot: Low-Effort
Thinking
Mental Strategies and Shortcuts
The availability heuristic is a mental rule of
thumb whereby people base a judgment on
the ease with which they can bring
something to mind.
:Doctors diagnosing illnesses
On Automatic Pilot: Low-Effort
Thinking
Mental Strategies and Shortcuts
The representativeness heuristic is a
mental shortcut whereby people classify
something according to how similar it is to
a typical case.
Nerelisin Hemşerim?
On Automatic Pilot: Low-Effort
Thinking
Mental Strategies and Shortcuts
Base rate information is information about
the frequency of members of different
categories in the population. It usually is
not considered when people are using
mental shortcuts.
On Automatic Pilot: Low-Effort
Thinking
Mental Strategies and Shortcuts
The anchoring and adjustment heuristic is a
mental shortcut that involves using a number
or value as a starting point, and then adjusting
one’s answer away from this anchor.
One example of anchoring and adjustment is
biased sampling, whereby people make
generalizations from samples of information
they know are biased or atypical.
On Automatic Pilot: Low-Effort
Thinking
The Pervasiveness of Automatic
Thinking
Chapter Outline
II. Controlled Social Cognition:
High-Effort Thinking
Controlled Social Cognition:
High-Effort Thinking
Controlled thinking is conscious,
voluntary, and effortful.
Controlled Social Cognition:
High-Effort Thinking
Automatic Believing, Controlled
Unbelieving
Controlled Social Cognition:
High-Effort Thinking
Thought Suppression and Ironic
Processing
Thought suppression is the attempt to
avoid thinking about something we would
prefer to forget.
Monitoring Process- Automatic
Operating Process- Controlled
Under cognitive load, TS is difficult.
Controlled Social Cognition:
High-Effort Thinking
Thought Suppression and Ironic
Processing
Being preoccupied reduces our ability to
engage in thought suppression, or the
attempt to avoid thinking about
something we would just as soon
forget.
Controlled Social Cognition:
High-Effort Thinking

Mentally Undoing the Past:
Counterfactual Reasoning
Counterfactual thinking is mentally
changing some aspect of the past as a
way of imagining what might have
been.
Chapter Outline
III. The Amadou Diallo Case
Revisited
Timothy Thomas
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Timothy Thomas was a 19-year old African-American man who was fatally shot by a
Cincinnati police officer in 2001. Thomas was the fifteenth African-American man killed by
the Cincinnati Police Department in five years, and his death led to outrage in the black
community that culminated with the 2001 Cincinnati Riots.

On April 8, 2001, Thomas was seen by Cincinnati police officers and recognized as being
wanted on 14 outstanding warrants. When Thomas realized he knew one of the officers,
he fled. In a subsequent chase involving a dozen additional officers, Thomas was
eventually confronted by Officer Steven Roach, in a dark alley. Roach was running with his
gun out (standard procedure) but with his finger on the trigger, in opposition gun
handling procedure taught to police. Immediately after the incident, Roach said the gun
had "just gone off" in his hand.[1] Later, Roach claimed to have seen a gun, and later
revised his story to claim that he only saw Thomas reaching for something at his waist,
and Roach fired his gun once at Thomas.

It was later revealed Thomas was unarmed, but may have been attempting to pull up his
pants. After Thomas fell, Officer Roach called for an ambulance, and when Thomas
arrived at University Hospital, he was declared dead.

Thomas was the father of one child.
The Amadou Diallo Case Revisited
Improving Human Thinking
Often we have more confidence in our
judgements than we should. To try to
improve reasoning skills, we need to
break through this overconfidence barrier
and make people more aware of the limits
of their cognitive abilities.